====== History of Blogging ======

The word "blog" is about 450 years older than the web. The lineage runs from ship's logs to flight logs to system logs to weblogs, and the practice (keeping a dated record) is older than all of them.

Adapted from [[https://brennan.day/a-450-year-history-of-blogging/|A 450-year History of Blogging]] on brennan.day.

===== The Log =====

  * **1574:** William Bourne's //A Regiment for the Sea// describes the ship's log: a wooden quadrant thrown overboard on a knotted line, its speed readings entered into the "log board." The knots give us both the word "log" for records and "knots" for speed. See [[https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/logging-ships-log-medium-0|Janet Sorenson's Logging-In]].
  * **1903 onward:** the Wright brothers kept detailed flight notebooks; flight logs became standard. See [[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-book-of-hours-136493265/|The Book of Hours]].
  * **~1960:** computing inherits the term. "Log in" likely dates to an MIT engineer naming a user command on CTSS or a similar system between 1959 and 1961. See [[https://www.designcult.org/2011/08/why-do-we-call-in-logging-in.html|The Secret History of Log In]] and [[https://www.etymonline.com/word/log|etymonline: log]].

===== The Weblog =====

  * **1992:** [[https://www.britannica.com/topic/blog|Tim Berners-Lee's first site]] at CERN worked like a blog: a dated stream of announcements and links about the web.
  * **1994:** Justin Hall starts [[https://www.links.net/vita/web/start/|Justin's Links from the Underground]] and publishes for 11 years: over 4,800 pages. See the [[https://web.archive.org/web/20050305110627/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/20/MNGBKBEJO01.DTL|SF Gate profile]] and [[indieweb:interlinking|Interlinking]].
  * **1997:** Jorn Barger coins "weblog" on December 17, 1997 to describe the logged links on his Robot Wisdom site.
  * **1999:** Peter Merholz shortens "weblog" to "blog" and posts the joke on his homepage; [[https://web.archive.org/web/19991013021124/http://peterme.com/index.html|the snapshot survives]]. The same year, [[https://blogger.com|Blogger]] launches and makes publishing push-button and accessible.
  * **2000s:** WordPress (2003), then hosted platforms like [[https://medium.com|Medium]] (2012) move the format onto corporate rails. There are now an estimated [[https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/blog/how-many-blogs-are-there-in-the-world-blogging-statistics-2023/|600 million blogs]].

===== See Also =====

  * [[indieweb:start|IndieWeb]]
  * [[indieweb:blogging|Blogging Platforms]]
  * [[indieweb:blogging_workflow|Blogging Workflow]]
  * [[indieweb:commonplace_log|Commonplace Log]]
  * [[indieweb:interlinking|Interlinking]]
  * [[indieweb:webmaster|Webmaster]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]